Institutional design, notary practices and credit in Buenos Aires during the first half of the XVIIth century

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the performance of short-term credit notarized in Buenos Aires during the first half of the XVIIth century at the escribanía pública y de Cabildo, the only notarial office in the city until the early following century. The analysis of the data provided by notarial operations suggests that this system of notarized credit expressed the development of non-personal credit transactions, non-conditioned by relational proximity. The distribution of such notarized instruments was not concentrated exclusively among the economically dominant group of this oligarchic society. This performance could be due to the interplay between the singularities of the local institutional structure set by the Crown, the actual functioning of the notarial institution, and the socioeconomic singularities of the port-city, suggesting that the core relationship between institutional design and economic performance was not necessarily a causal or unidirectional relationship.